Workshop Introduction and Motivation

The emerging fusion of Bioinformatics and Health Informatics has promoted research and development in target drugs, personalized medicine, clinical decision support and population health management, etc. and collaborations among researchers in bioinformatics and health informatics and clinicians as well as data scientists. It also demands big data analytics incorporating latest advancements in data mining, machine learning, statistical methodology and big data. Precision Medicine and All People Health Initiatives promote more investment and research in precision medicine, an innovative approach to disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles. In turn, it also creates higher demands for big data analytics for connecting genetic data, personal gene data, drug information, medical record, and clinical outcomes.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a platform for professionals, researchers, clinicians, and data scientists to share opinions and exchange ideas, so as to facilitate fusion of Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Personalized Medicine, Population Health and Data Science. Ultimately it contributes to better quality of life of patients and healthier population as well as big data analytic technology advancements that support and promote such research activities.

This is the fifth annual KDDBHI workshop continuing on the success of three prior workshops. The First KDDBHI workshop was debuted at KDD 2014, New York, NY. The Second KDDBHI workshop is held in conjunction with ACM BCB 2015 conference, Atlanta, GA. The Third KDDBHI workshop is held at IEEE Big Data 2016 Conference, Washington, D.C. The fourth KDDBHI workshop is held at IEEE Big Data 2017 Conference, Boston, MA. In this fifth workshop, we continue to attract more research and applications of big data analytics, technology and platforms for precision medicine, personalized medicine, and other clinical innovations, in particular, the integration and fabrication of big data from patient gene sequencing, patient life style and socio-economic data, electronic medical records, drug design and targeting, and population and individual level drug treatments, and medical and pharmacy claims.

Workshop Topics and Target Audience

As increasingly massive amounts of computational biological information, including genome sequences, protein sequences, gene expression data, becomes available, more efficient, sensitive, and specific big data analytic technology in Bioinformatics become critically in need. For example, terabytes or more of raw data are easily generated in next-generation sequencing experiments. Also, in biological and biomedical imaging process and analysis, large volumes of data are generated. Consequently, how to store, achieve, index, manage, learn, mine, and visualize the big data is clearly a challenge to the research community.

Similarly, for the past decade, there have been a variety of efforts and progresses from healthcare organizations and companies in digitizing, storing, analyzing medical data. For instance, predictive analytics and risk adjustment allow insurance companies and healthcare organizations to predict the future costs for budgets and population health management, perform risk adjustment, develop the treatment guidelines, plan care management strategies, and measure physician performance.

With The emergence and advancements inPrecision Medicine and Personalized Medicine, it calls for further fusion of Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Clinical Outcome and Population Health, and application of big data analytics to the ever growing big data. For instance, the integration of genetic test results, patient-specific sequencing, expression profiling, tissue image data, and clinical data in a patient medical record provides opportunities for personalized medicine, target drug research, and treatment effectiveness research, which are all necessary components of precision medicine. The recent advancement in big data technology and research, make it now the perfect time to marry the research and application.

Featured Topics (Big Data Research and Applications in)

· Precision Medicine & Personalized Medicine

· Health Analytics and Informatics

· Target Drug Design and Discovery

· RNAseq and Microarray Gene expression Data Analysis

· Gene Regulatory Network Construction

· Next-generation Sequencing (NGS) Analysis

· Functional Genomics

· Population, Evolution, and Comparative Genomics

· Transnational Bioinformatics

· Protein Structure Prediction

· Protein Function Analysis

· Healthcare and Healthcare Delivery

· Healthcare policy research

· Healthcare outcomes research, monitoring and evaluation

· Hospital Information System

· Electronic Medical Record and Electronic Health Record

· Population Health and Public Health Management

· Mobile Health and Sensor Applications

· Other areas related to healthcare informatics and analytics

· Other areas related to proteomics and genomics

Target Audience

The goal of this workshop is to bring together practitioners, researchers, clinicians, and data scientists in the area of Bioinformatics and Health Informatics to share latest findings in the field, exchange ideas on how to improve the strategies, address real-world problems in Bioinformatics and Healthcare, and explore the intersections between Bioinformatics and Health Informatics and new research areas brought by advancement in big data analytics, data mining, machine learning and statistical learning.